R – Alternative to ActiveX controls

activexcontrolsservice

I am developing and application service and I want users to be able to query programatically (the service would then return back any data requested). My working plan now is to use ActiveX controls, but i have been told they are out of date. I was wondering what would be some more recent/platform-independent solutions out there? (I don't know much about controls) Any help would be very appreciated 🙂

Andrew

Best Answer

I'm not really sure about how you plan the application to function based on the the information you have provided. If you have a service and ActiveX controls you are really limited to certain Windows platforms. Assuming the ActiveX controls need to run inside a browser, you are limited to Internet Explorer.

Consider whether you need the service to communicate with other computers. Perhaps exposing the server with some sort of web services or web-based protocol would allow:

Access from other computers
Browsers other than IE to access your service

Update: To follow on from @voyager's comment on web services you are building a communications layer which could be written in TCP/IP sockets (low-level) up to Web Services (mostly XML over HTTP). Your service could listen on port 80 for HTTP requests and respond accordingly, or you could leverage a web server like IIS. This means you don't need to have your own HTTP/Web stack which may be desirable. With IIS you would have some web services which exposed your logic implemented by your service (service <==> iis <==> client/browser).

IIS provides a range of security options for intranet or internet. Connections can be secured with SSL and you can leverage various authentication methods (NTLM, Kerberos, Basic).

Related Solutions

R – What permissions are needed to install and update an ActiveX control

It has been many, many, moons since I've had to be concerned with developing ActiveX controls embedded in a web page for a commercial product.

Kudo's to you and your team for doing things the right way. I've seen too many commercial, web based, applications force enterprises to lower the security requirements of Internet Explorer because they couldn't take the time to properly package their application.

The basic premise that I remember was that you had to implement at least one specific interface, IObjectSafety, add a couple of specific component category ids during component registration, and sign your .cab with a certificate from a trusted CA such as Verisign.

Check out:

If that doesn't work, try go get a hold of your local Microsoft Developer Evangelist to help point you in the right direction.

If you have a Microsoft Support Contract, then contact your Technical Account Manager (TAM) or Application Developer Consultant (ADC) for additional help.

Good Luck,

C# – Dynamically create controls using stringbuilder

Like Torbjörn Hansson says, if you just add a name attribute (and maybe remove runat="server" from your original snippet) you'll be able to access the submitted value but you'll only have a client-side HTML <input /> element.

If you are wanting to dynamically create server-side controls then you'll have to do something like this:

TextBox textbox = new TextBox {
    /* take care to create unique ID's if you're adding more than 1 TextBox */
    ID = "foo", 
    Text = "bar"
};

Controls.Add(textbox);

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – What permissions are needed to install and update an ActiveX control

C# – Dynamically create controls using stringbuilder

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